This invention relates to the field of medical content recommendation. In particular, the invention relates to personalized medical content recommendation.
In recent years, it has been recognized that errors in medical decision making processes can lead to disastrous outcomes. Both governmental and private healthcare organizations are concerned with patient safety, realizing that improvements in patient safety can help to minimize healthcare risks and increase recovery rates. Many organizations invest a lot of money every year in exploring new ways for improving patients' safety. New dedicated IT solutions for the patient safety domain are continuously being explored, aiming at helping to prevent mistakes by medical teams and patients due to erroneous decisions. Some of these solutions are targeted at personalization of medical content recommendations to patients gathered from public web sources.
Drug overdosing or underdosing, or the consumption of some drug together with other drugs or foods, may result in undesirable outcomes of adverse drug events (ADEs), which may be life threatening and even lead to death. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), ADEs result in more than 770,000 injuries and deaths every year, costing up to 5.6 million dollars per hospital per year. Furthermore, patients who experience ADEs are hospitalized an average of 8 to 12 days longer than patients who do not suffer from ADEs; this in turn, results in additional 16,000 to 24,000 dollars on average in hospitalization costs.
It is estimated that anywhere from 28% to 95% of ADEs could be prevented by reducing medication errors. There are many useful drug and ADE related knowledge sources available on the web that can be utilized to discover existing or even new potential ADEs and provide timely alerts to relevant patients. To name few examples of such sources, are governmental health monitoring services such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) MedWatch alerting service that publish updates related to various patient safety and ADE related topics, online medical digital libraries such as PubMed (PubMed is a trade mark of National Library of Medicine, The Federal Agency United States) that provide updates about new published ADE-related research works, and online ADE knowledge sources such as DrugBank and SIDER (Side Effect Resource) that provide access to various knowledge about drug interactions and side-effects using semantic web technology. Other drug-related websites such as Drugs.com and MedlinePlus (MedlinePlus is a trade mark of National Library of Medicine, The Federal Agency United States) also provide valuable information about various drugs, potential interactions, and side-effects, via simple keyword based search.
In spite of the high amounts of knowledge about drugs and ADEs, it still remains a profound challenge for patients or even their physicians to discover relevant ADE knowledge. The “information barriers” those users face can be classified into three main types. First, users may be unaware of the existence of these sources. Second, many users, especially patients, usually are not familiar with drug and ADE terminology. Such users usually lack of the required technical skills for correctly expressing their information needs for accessing ADE knowledge, such as the one provided by DrugBank and SIDER. Third, the large amounts of data make it difficult for users to locate relevant and useful information for their needs.